Olin Lathrop wrote:
> Dave Tweed wrote:
> > There is also a body of "mature, disciplined and experienced"
> > programmers who see the limitations of a straightjacket language
> > like Pascal. They get an awful lot of useful programming done in
> > other languages, including C.
> 
> So show me something reasonable and useful you can do in C that you
> can't in Pascal (again, I'm using Pascal only as a example because
> I happen to know it well).

That isn't what we're debating here. I'm sure that all useful Pascal
dialects are at some level Turing-complete.

I've used Pascal in the past (including Apollo Pascal), but I'm hardly
an expert. As I recall, the biggest difficulties were with I/O, where
you want to treat an arbitrary chunk of data as just a stream of bytes
or bits, possibly embedded in another data structure.

Marshalling data (and executable code) across an I/O interface is
nontrivial in any language, but strongly-typed languages make it
particularly tedious -- and arguably no less error-prone.

> > The point that everyone has been making to you, Olin, is that no
> > one is forced to use C, not on any platform -- there's always an
> > alternative available.*
> 
> Perhaps technically, but not in practise. Compare the number of C
> compilers offered by Microchip for their chips versus non-C compilers
> they offer. Look at the same statistics for third party vendors. There
> are a few non-C offerings out there, but are by far in the minority.

So, you're saying that you're not unhappy because alternatives are not
available (they are), but unhappy because they're not as popular as C?
Geez, this discussion is more pointless than I thought!

-- Dave Tweed
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